July 23, 2015
The Passive House standard created by Passivhaus Institut of Germany is the latest, toughest standard in sustainable design. Owners and developers around the world have certified Passive House buildings, including U.K. property giant Grosvenor. In the United States, developers are now building hundreds of new units of housing to meet the Passive House standards in states like New York and Pennsylvania.

Twenty-two real estate developments have been selected as finalists in the 2015 ULI Global Awards for Excellence competition. This year’s finalists represent developments from around the globe, including six in Asia, five in Europe, and 11 in North America.

July 23, 2015
The Passive House standard created by Passivhaus Institut of Germany is the latest, toughest standard in sustainable design. Owners and developers around the world have certified Passive House buildings, including U.K. property giant Grosvenor. In the United States, developers are now building hundreds of new units of housing to meet the Passive House standards in states like New York and Pennsylvania.

Minneapolis-based Dominium is cooking up a new use for the former Pillsbury flour mill complex on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Four buildings on the 3.2-acre (1.3 ha) site are being transformed into the A-Mill Artist Lofts, a 251-unit affordable housing project that will serve working artists.

Soon to celebrate its centennial, San Francisco’s historic City Hall was recently awarded LEED Platinum certification for Existing Buildings: Operation & Maintenance (EBOM), the oldest building in the United States to achieve the USGBC’s highest rating.

Recent Articles

Affordable housing projects are often ground zero for the achievement gap that exists in the United States said panelists at the ULI Housing Opportunity conference. Nearly one in four American children (22 percent as of 2013) live in poverty, with half of those children living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.

An unloved, enclosed downtown shopping mall is being opened up to create a “Rockefeller Center” for Los Angeles. The centerpiece of this $421 million project is an upscale 400,000-square-foot (37,000 sq m) outdoor shopping, dining, and entertainment district fashioned out of Macy’s Plaza, a brick-clad, fortresslike indoor mall that was erected in 1973.

“The hard truth is that we really have to rebuild and build new with the expectation of likely extreme weather in the future,” said Harriet Tregoning, principal deputy assistant secretary, Office of Community Planning and Development Resilience at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, speaking as a panelist at ULI’s Housing Opportunity 2015 conference in Minneapolis.

This is a much-anticipated book, and the basic message is an important one: small-scale actions play an essential role in ensuring that cities—and especially the street frontage or building blocks within them—are responsive to genuine but unmet needs

More than 30 of the nation’s leading multifamily developers, owners, and capital providers gathered in May to discuss issues facing the industry at the 2nd annual ULI/Carolyn and Preston Butcher Forum on Multifamily Housing in Houston, Texas, with four key themes emerging.

The Passive House standard created by Passivhaus Institut of Germany is the latest, toughest standard in sustainable design. Owners and developers around the world have certified Passive House buildings, including U.K. property giant Grosvenor. In the United States, developers are now building hundreds of new units of housing to meet the Passive House standards in states like New York and Pennsylvania.

Not long ago, it seemed as if e-commerce would make brick-and-mortar retail as obsolete as rotary telephones. Instead, catalog and web retailer L.L.Bean is leading a wave of businesses that are building physical storefronts to drive their online trade.

Population growth and a market playing catch-up to meet pent-up demand threaten the region’s affordability, according to a panel of mayors from the Twin Cities that kicked off the 2015 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference in Minneapolis.

Designing more human-centered communities requires “moving beyond intentions of what we hope to create to finding ways to actually engage with people [in order] to get there,” said designer and architect Liz Ogbu, speaking at ULI’s Housing Opportunity Conference in Minneapolis last week.

For the first time in history, more people are living in urban centers than in rural areas. “It is an amazing thing that is happening around the world,” said Henry G. Cisneros, founder and chairman of CityView, a developer and investment management firm focused on urban residential real estate in the western United States. The former secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said, “The jury is still out on how this plays [out], but we do know where people are going to be. They are going to be in these urban settings, and they are going to be very powerful places.”

Convenience, authenticity, and connectivity were attributes that experts used to characterize trends in master-planned communities during a panel discussion titled “New Dimensions in Master Planning” at the National Association of Real Estate Editors’ recent annual conference in Miami. During the session, panelists tackled questions of how people will work in the future, changing attitudes and processes regarding land planning, and whether or not golf is still part of the resort picture.

Health is emerging as a significant aspect of this Real estate developers’ work. Projects that advance health may also have a market advantage, and one method of determining health impacts is by conducting a health impact assessment (HIA).

International economic forces have taken center stage this week, affecting both U.S. stock markets and real estate investment trusts. The crash in the Chinese stock market and ongoing concerns about the future of Greece in the Eurozone drove markets down during the first half of the week, with REITs faring better than the overall market. Plus, interest rate survey results from Trepp.

This brief tome, a revised edition of a book by the same title published in 2009, trumpets the cause of edible cities with new examples of the growing international movement bent on ensuring the basic human right to a healthy daily diet, while also returning to food sources that are both local and affordable.